Mark Steyn is a gem of a columnist and his loss is one of the reasons I can't really be bothered much to read a National Post much these days. Thankfully, he is published around the world and readily available on line. His response to all the hang wringing over the awful end to the hostage taking in Russia:
Sorry, it won't do. I remember a couple of days after September 11 writing in some column or other that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn't whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it. Three years on, that's still the difference. We can all get upset about dead children, but unless you're giving honest thought to what was responsible for the slaughter your tasteful elegies are no use. ... When your asymmetrical warfare strategy depends on gunning down schoolchildren, you're getting way more asymmetrical than you need to be. The reality is that the IRA and ETA and the ANC and any number of secessionist and nationalist movements all the way back to the American revolutionaries could have seized schoolhouses and shot all the children. But they didn't. Because, if they had, there would have been widespread revulsion within the perpetrators' own communities.And what community would that be? You see, you can't take any action if you don't know who or what it is that you are facing.
The particular character of this "insurgency" does not derive from the requirements of "asymmetrical warfare" but from . . . well, let's see, what was the word missing from those three analyses of the Beslan massacre? Here's a clue: half the dead "Chechen separatists" were not Chechens at all, but Arabs. And yet, tastefully tiptoeing round the subject, The New York Times couldn't bring itself to use the words Muslim or Islamist, for fear presumably of offending multicultural sensibilities.Only an idiot would use the word racist to attack Steyn for pointing this out. He is only saying that a large part of the Muslim community, the part confined mostly to the Arab word, is having a large problem with the issue of terrorism. He most definitely not saying that all Muslims are terrorists. People confuse those two very different positions for only two reasons. One, they are idiots and cannot tell the two positions from one another. This is, sadly, all too common. Some patience and some education goes a long way here. The other reason people do this, knowing full well that they are sowing seeds of discord and confusion, is that they seek to paralyze us into inaction. They seek to lead us to a mental and moral position from which any act of self defense is impossible, because it is "racist" or "fascist." These are intelligent people who oppose Western Civilization, for whatever reason. And they must be opposed. It is an existential battle; to lose is to die.
Comments